An email exchange with David Futrelle, and our suggestion of a topic for a new blog post from him

David Futrelle had some comments to make about our linking to the story of LEGO’s plans for a new range of miniature folk, ‘female scientists’. He linked to our blog piece in his own piece, with a title stating that along with the other thought criminals, I’m a misogynist (yawn). We’re sure the LEGO range will be a bestseller.

This morning I emailed David Futrelle, and he responded with an intriguing request. This is our exchange so far:

David, good morning. Thanks again for pointing your site’s visitors to our piece about the LEGO ‘female scientists’ story. The piece – and the blog more generally – has received hundreds more ‘hits’ as a result, a phenomenon which I believe is familiar to AVfM, and presumably other MHRA sites and individual MHRAs. We’ve had an unprecedented number of new people subscribing to the J4MB blog, and a number emailed me with supportive messages.

We run five websites (links below), please let me know if I can help direct you to materials on any particular topic. Misogyny seems to be your big ‘thing’ – though of course it’s invariably a projection in the minds of people driven my misandry – so I thought you might be interested in a recent blog piece, accessible through the following link. It includes a perceptive piece from a supporter, Paul Inman, on how feminists have made the word ‘misogyny’ utterly meaningless:

Hundreds? My stats say I sent you less than a hundred, most of whom probably laughed at you and left. But thanks for providing me material for a post that’s gotten several thousand hits. Feel free to link me to posts of yours that have been unfairly labeled as misogynistic so I can give them a look-see, and thus a little bit more traffic.

My response:

Thanks David. My stats say 85 so far directly from your blog piece, so I guess people must have communicated with others, pointing them to the J4MB site? Big spike in ‘hits’ coming from our Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as from sources I can’t identify. I don’t have much time to spend on this matter – I’m busy working on my speech for the Detroit conference – but including direct and indirect ‘hits’ I’d hazard a guess that J4MB traffic has increased by maybe 350+ hits over its average running level in the space of a few hours.

‘Posts that have unfairly been labelled misogynistic’? Well, that would be ALL of them which have been labelled thus. But let me pick one specific topic. It’s to do with increasing gender diversity in the boardroom, henceforth ‘GDITB’.

Feminists have thought it misogynistic for an organisation I launched in 2012 and have run since – Campaign for Merit in Business http://c4mb.wordpress.com – to keep pointing to evidence showing that GDITB leads to declines in corporate financial performance. Our short briefing paper with the Abstracts of five longitudinal studies showing the impacts of GDITB:

I’ve presented this evidence to House of Commons and House of Lords inquiries, the following is the video of my House of Commons appearance in 2012:

The government continues to bully FTSE100 companies into achieving 25% female representation on their boards by 2015, through the threat of legislated gender quotas. We know from recent reports that the government is planning to threaten the FTSE350 with 50% gender quotas. Because when you’re paddling downstream in a canoe on the Niagara river, and you start to hear the roar of the waterfalls, you should paddle faster towards them, right?

Good luck with trying to find evidence of a causal link between GDITB and enhanced financial performance – the oft-cited ‘business case’. We’ve challenged the government, dozens of organisations pressing for this ‘direction of travel’, and hundreds of individual proponents across the developed world – many of them employed in lucrative jobs allied to this insane policy direction – to provide evidence of a causal link. None has ever done so. The best they can do is misrepresent a number of studies and reports, all of which make it perfectly that there’s no evidence of causal links, nor can causal links even be implied from the statistics. The following link will take you to a few of the prominent / influential proponents of GDITB who’ve failed to meet our public challenges. They include Vince Cable MP. who leads the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills:

I look forward to your blog piece on this. I shall, of course, be happy to respond to any questions that are asked by yourself or your blog followers, so long as they’re substantive and not ideological in origin e.g. trotting out the baseless ‘glass ceiling’ conspiracy theory, which inspired my book The Glass Ceiling Delusion: the real reasons more women don’t reach senior positions. I’ll now post a new blog piece, with the contents of this email exchange.